


Fire on the Mountain

by Sholio



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Kid Fic, Terrible childhoods, but Yondu's really trying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 17:53:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11537400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: If the kid's gonna be on the ship, he needs to learn to use a gun.That flashback scene of Peter and Yondu launched a thousand fics, and here's mine. Yondu doesn't know how to do any of this, but he's gonna try anyway.





	Fire on the Mountain

**Author's Note:**

> For my "lost childhood" h/c bingo square. (Title from a Grateful Dead song.)

If the kid's gonna be on the ship, he needs to learn to use a gun. He's a total liability otherwise. A distraction, a danger.

Which he is anyway, because eight Terran years old is too goddamn young to be on a mercenary ship. Yondu's taken on teenagers before (like Kraglin) but the kind of teenagers who make good Ravagers are a different breed altogether from this brat. They're street kids or brothel-asteroid whores' children or escaped slaves like himself, scrappy and fierce and already used to a world of violence. 

They come bringing skills to the table, is the point. 

Kraglin was maybe four, five years older than this boy when Yondu picked him up in a seedy spaceport on a Xandarian colony out along the fringe of the Nova Empire frontier. Mom died of some kind of sickness after too many years working on the colony's antenna array without protective equipment, dad was a deadbeat drunk, and Kraglin had already been fending for himself for a couple of years, doing low-end courier work and shoplifting for the local gangs, when Yondu picked him up. Kid could handle a gun, a knife, and a scattering of improvised street weapons, and could drive a space tug (badly -- but the controls weren't that different from an M-ship, and he was game to learn). He already _got_ how to fight in groups, the basic strategy of staying out of your side's line of fire and all of that; gang life would do that for you. Kraglin could push a knife through a man's throat and hardly blink as he went down with the life gurgling out of him.

Quill ain't that kind of kid. He's _soft._ He's a scrappy little fighter, kid's got heart all right, but it's obvious that all he knows about fighting, he learned in schoolyards from other kids like him, the kind with a momma that loves 'em and a square meal and soft bed to go home to at night. He's a crybaby, he's weak, he doesn't know _anything_ , he's gonna get et up out here ...

Some part of Yondu says: _He's a normal kid. That's what a normal kid is like. It ain't a Terran thing; okay, SOME of it is, 'cause they're a worthless hick planet under galactic interdict -- what kind of kid ain't never seen anybody except his own species by the time he's this age? But mostly, everything about him that drives you up the fuckin' wall is just bein' a regular kid. It's just that you've never met one before._

But ... the kid's got heart, got enough heart for five kids his size, and he's sharp as a tack. Even before they got a translator in him, he figured out enough Xandarian and Low Kree to make himself understood, and he soaks up everything he sees like a little sponge. He's already got the hang of thieving; Yondu's been sending him to take little things from the crew quarters, and he only had to get punched by Horuz one time before he figured out how not to get caught. (Experience is a good teacher.)

The thing is, damn it, at the age of eight-going-on-nine, even though he don't know the first thing about weapons or ships or space in general, he's got more smarts and spunk and common sense than probably a third of the adults in Yondu's crew. Maybe half. Maybe two-thirds. He just ain't got the training yet.

Yondu has no idea how what was supposed to be a very temporary arrangement -- the kid was _cargo,_ damn it -- somehow turned tolerably permanent, and he's not examining it too closely because he doesn't want to turn over those particular rocks, doesn't want to know what's squirming underneath.

But he does know the kid needs to be able to handle a gun if he's gonna be on Yondu's ship.

 

***

 

So here they are on Radau.

It ain't much of a world, just one of a string of planets in the contested zone along the Nova Empire's border with the Kree. Half the planet is slag from old fighting, a generation or more gone now (Yondu doesn't think he was involved, but he can't ever be sure); the rest is ocean and forest and scattered, isolated farms. The planet's small population is made up of die-hard old-timers who weren't scared off by half a century of warfare, plus their descendants, with their numbers bumped up by the kind of fortune-hunters and frontier types who are starting to drift out here now that most of the planet has stopped glowing in the dark.

Basically they ain't the type who are gonna notice an M-ship breaking atmo without a by-your-leave.

He lands in a clearing next to a falling-down steel-and-plasticrete tower that's been mostly reclaimed by forest; the disturbance of the ship sends up a dark swirl of birds that've been nesting in the building's crumbling rooms. From the scraps of paving material still visible under the thick blue-green grass, this might've been a parking area for ground vehicles or a runway, a long time ago. Doesn't matter now, any more than it matters if the sprawl of forest around it used to be a park or a zoo or farm fields or whatever. The sensors don't show any radiation or unexploded ordnance or bioweapons lurking in the soil, which makes it as good of a place as anywhere else, and that's what matters.

Quill trots out at Yondu's heels, little legs working overtime to stay in the shadow of Yondu's coat. He's finally started to learn a _few_ basic lessons, at least: stay out of the way, don't go running on ahead to look at any sparkly thing that catches his attention, and don't get left behind --

\-- spoke too soon. Yondu grabs him by the collar with a quick, practiced hand as Quill starts haring off toward the dark verge of the woods. 

"But I want to look at --"

"No you don't," Yondu says, letting him go with a shake after shoving him behind the tails of the flaring Ravager coat once again.

Quill sulks for roughly a quarter of a second before his natural exuberance explodes again. "Where are we?"

"Don't matter."

"Why are we here?"

"None of your business."

"What's here that's cool?" Quill asks, trying a different tack.

"Nothing."

Quill shuts up for a little while, mostly because he's distracted looking around at everything as Yondu finds an animal trail leading into the woods and stalks down it, alert and quiet, the arrow powered up but quiescent in its holster. Scanning from above, he found a place that looked good, a rocky little plateau adjacent to a landing site big enough to accommodate the M-ship. Now he follows the map in his head, a skill he learned long ago because nobody bothers to tell battle slaves how to get anywhere more than once (and usually not even once).

\-- and Quill's not at his heels anymore. God _damn_ it. He veers back to find the kid a few yards back up the trail, crouched down to look at a sprawling plant with cup-shaped flowers filled with rainwater. Yondu unceremoniously hauls him up by the collar of his Ravager jacket. One reason why it made sense to put him in cut-down Ravager leathers is 'cause they're sturdy.

"Hey! I wasn't touching it! I swear!" One of the lessons Yondu's been trying to hammer through the kid's parsec-thick skull is _don't touch anything you don't know what it is,_ with moderate success.

"I tell you to stop, boy?"

"I'm casing the joint," Quill says brightly. That's another skill Yondu's been trying to teach him, though apparently some of the finer points have slipped through the cracks. 

"No you ain't. C'mon."

Quill stays where he's supposed to be for the requisite second or two, before a bright-colored, four-winged bird bursts out of the trees up ahead. He makes a startled gasp and double-times his steps so he can press up against the back of Yondu's coat, which would be refreshingly obedient for a change (a few teeth-rattling slaps upside the head seem to have finally trained the kid not to _scream_ on strange planets, while sneaking around in caverns, and other situations of that nature) if it weren't for the fact that a) he almost trips Yondu, which is not a good tactical skill; and b) when startled and falling back on gut instinct, he seems to think of Yondu as _safety_ for some reason.

Which comes down to the crux of the issue: the kid ain't afraid of him. At all. Hasn't been since real early on. And that just might be one of those squirming things under rocks that Yondu's really carefully not looking at.

Oh, Quill still _thinks_ he is, Yondu's pretty sure. When Yondu bares his teeth at him, cuffs him in the head, snaps an order that's backed up by the hum of the arrow, kid hops to it right quick. But most of the time ...

Okay, so. Yondu knows what a scared kid looks like. He ought to. He spent the first couple decades of his life _being_ a scared kid, surrounded by scared kids, learning how to push it down and hide it under anger. The kind of childhood Quill comes from is as foreign to him as the surface of Terra itself (more so, really; he's been to hick planets before, but _that's_ a country he'll never be able to explore), but every time he looks at Quill, he knows what's _not_ there, and it's the kind of cringing terror and stomach-biting fury that comes from knowing you ain't nothing to the people responsible for you, nothing except units, and they'll fry you and throw you on the trash heap if you ever stop being worth enough to make it worth feeding you.

This kid, who just stumbled into Yondu's back because his first instinct when spooked on a potentially hostile planet is to seek shelter with Yondu, who is now staring around him with wide-eyed wonder and one hand lightly touching the back of Yondu's coat to make sure he stays close this time --

This kid, no matter what the little brat might tell _himself_ \-- this kid ain't scared. Not of Yondu, anyway.

There's a part of Yondu thinks he ought to smack some sense into the brat. He ain't _nice._ He ain't _safe._ He ain't nobody's shelter in any kind of storm.

It's way easier to deal with kids like Kraglin, all hard edges and fledgling machismo: kids who fell over the borders of manhood way too early, who already know most of the things that men know but just don't have the life experience to put 'em into practice. Yondu knows how to train Kraglin, and the other, similarly young members of the crew: how to pull out the fierceness without letting it become senseless cruelty, how to teach them the Code and why it's important, how to hammer tin into a sort of lumpy and imperfect steel, but steel anyways.

(And if he thinks about who taught him to do that, it's never for very long and only to scrape new lessons out of those old memories, not for any other reason.)

But Quill ain't like that; Yondu doesn't know what Quill's gonna be, doesn't know when a blow will push him toward obedience or right in the other direction. Quill's as unpredictable as a gob of spit skittering around on a hot stove. And while he can't understand the kid most of the time, Yondu knows _exactly_ how he could get obedience out of Quill, or at least a show of it. He could break the kid, break him to follow orders, and he knows exactly how to do it because it was done to him.

And if he doesn't do it, it don't make him good, it just makes him not as bad as the people who starved him and broke his body and took away his heart and left nothing but a knot of scar tissue where it once was.

 

***

 

The plateau is less open than it looked on the scans, ringed all 'round with trees, while a sharp wind blows Yondu's coat back and whips the kid's hair around as he leans between two gnarled trunks, peering over the edge to look down at the lumpy tops of the branches far below.

Maybe the problem ain't that the kid don't think Yondu's a threat; maybe it's just that growing up mollycoddled and soft broke the part of him that assesses danger. He's just not scared of things. Yondu's known people like that, though usually they came at it from the other way.

Except he _was_ scared of Yondu in the beginning. He was terrified of the whole crew. And he's still scared of most of 'em, which shows good sense given that he's got a pretty keenly honed feeling for which ones he can dog around the ship and get under their feet (Kraglin; Tullk; a few others) and which ones he can't.

Yondu shakes it off -- _don't matter, don't matter_ \-- and takes out the small blaster he found in the armory. Looked like it'd fit little hands pretty good.

"C'mere, boy."

Somehow, without ever using the techniques _he_ was taught (the whip, the shock prod, the punishment box) he seems to have managed to get some semblance of obedience out of Quill anyway, because the kid comes immediately. Maybe he's just learned that that's the voice that goes right before "... that's gonna sting you to death" or "... 'cause we gotta get the hell off this planet before the Nova Corps gets here."

Yondu kneels down to bring himself to the kid's level and holds out the blaster, butt first. Quill's eyes go wide and his whole face lights up, and Yondu catches the corners of his mouth quirking up in instinctive response and has to fight the grin back down.

"You're gonna teach me how to shoot a gun," Quill breathes.

"Sure am. Take it."

Quill hesitates, then grabs it like he thinks Yondu's gonna take back the offer. He turns it over in his hands, then points it in a random direction, right past Yondu's ear, squeezing one eye shut --

Yondu smacks his arm down with a blow that's calculated to hurt, right on the crook of the elbow.

"Ow!" Quill yelps. The gun falls from nerveless fingers. He scowls at Yondu, rubbing his arm, while Yondu picks it up.

"And this is why we ain't doin' this on the ship. First lesson: never point a gun at anything you don't want to kill. An' I tell you what, boy --"

He whistles. The arrow zips out of its holster. Quill freezes, one hand clutching his arm, staring wide-eyed as the weapon rotates slowly in front of his face.

"You ever point a gun at me again, boy, I'm gonna kill you slow an' feed you to the crew. You hear me?"

Quill swallows. The point of the arrow is inches from his eye.

"You answer me now, boy."

"Y-yes," comes the small response, and something inside Yondu withers a little; a voice not unlike Stakar's is saying: _Keep it up, kid; be what they made you. But that's not all you are._

He whistles the arrow back where it belongs and picks up the gun. Quill stares at it warily, rubbing his arm, with fresh tears in his eyes (goddamn kid can't stop crying; it's one of the things drives Yondu the craziest, because _he_ got the tears smacked out of him forever when he was probably half Quill's age).

"Tell me the first lesson," Yondu says, and his voice is quiet now, patient. He leans close, and the boy sways close as well. 

"Don't point a gun at what you don't want to kill," Quill recites.

Kid's smart. Yondu very firmly is _not_ proud. "That's right. Second lesson: know your weapon like it's a part of your body. Here's how it works. This here's the power cell --"

He goes over it quick. Quill watches, tears forgotten, and repeats back everything, just right. Yondu shows him how to snap the parts in and out. Clever little fingers, already learning the light work of pickpocketing, follow along when Yondu gives him the gun.

He's a natural.

Yondu never doubted it for a minute.

"All right," he says. "You can take apart your gun and put it back together. You know better'n to ever point it at your captain -- right?"

Quill nods, and now Yondu lets a grin slip through, sharp-edged and dangerous. "You know what we do now, boy?"

Quill shakes his head vigorously, too-long hair swishing around. _Gonna have to get that cut,_ Yondu thinks absently. _Grownups in the crew can do what they want, but that's gonna put him in danger in a fight, someone grabs onto that._

"We blow shit up," he says, and Quill's answering grin is sunny and delighted. Something goes through Yondu, as bright and sharp as his arrow. He _likes_ that look on Peter's face.

Still crouching, Yondu turns him around; Quill goes obediently along with it, letting himself be manhandled into position. Yondu shows him how to line up a shot. "This here's live ammo, boy. Show me how you change the setting on the switch." Quill does: from safe to stun to kill to the powerpack-draining setting that'll incinerate anything in front of him. "An' which one you wanna use?"

"Is that a trick?" Quill asks. Personally he's got all the guile of a particularly honest rock; that's another thing they're gonna have to work on.

"Nope. You pick."

Quill's finger hesitates, then pushes the lever all the way forward.

"Good boy," Yondu says, and he can all but feel the boy's fierce grin, feel it in the set of his shoulders and the feet-wide-apart way he's standing. He's got Quill braced between his arms, one of his hands steadying the boy's; he can feel the quick rise and fall of the small rib cage as Quill presses against his chest and Yondu sights down the gun along with the boy.

"Line it up," he says. "Pick your target. Squeeze the trigger slow."

Nothing in his life ever prepared him for this. No one ever did this with him. He learned to shoot, all right -- learned at gunpoint, using the bodies of slower classmates as target practice.

Trees are better targets. Trees don't scream. And some small furious part of his soul doesn't want Quill to learn what that's like. Not 'till he's older. Maybe not ever.

He holds the boy in his arms and helps him line up his very first shot and he's all too aware of how fragile it is, this child's life he holds braced against him; he's all too conscious that he _doesn't know how to do this,_ that bones break and minds break and all he ever learned, growing up, was how to break things.

Well, if he is an arrow, let him at least teach this boy how to direct it.

"Now," he breathes, and the boy's finger squeezes the trigger slowly; hell, better'n half Yondu's crew could've done -- and blue-white fire tears through one of the trees on the canyon rim. In a shower of sparks and splinters, it topples slowly over the edge with a series of tearing, wrenching cracks.

There ain't much recoil on an energy gun, but the boy's wrist still jerks 'cause he's not braced for it. Yondu brings the gun down in a smooth arc, moving Quill's hands and absently thumbing the selector lever back to "safe." Gonna have to talk about that, too. But for now --

For now, Quill's face turns up to his, eyes sparkling like diamonds.

"Did you see that? Yondu, did you see?"

Far below them, the tree crunches into the forest beneath.

And Yondu looks down at the child's face filled with wonder and excitement and ... things he doesn't even know the name for -- things that were beaten out of him long ago, and he _doesn't mind,_ he doesn't have to squash any vicious urges to hit Quill and beat those things out of him too. All he wants to do is cage this kid in his arms and beat the absolute shit out of anyone who wants to take that bright wonder out of his eyes or damage the barest corner of everything this child is.

And as the warm feeling sinks through him, opening up channels in his scarred-over heart that he thought had withered long ago, all he can do is look down at the brat and think: _Shit._

He's in way more trouble than he thought.

"Can we do it again?" Peter asks eagerly.

And Yondu hears his own voice answering back: "Sure we can. Sure we're gonna. Ain't due back at the ship for a full cycle."

"We're down here for a day? Are we camping?"

"Guess so."

"Can we make a campfire?"

"Sure," Yondu sighs, and lifts the small wrists, lining up another shot.


End file.
